The Janitors' Closet

Plastic bags - good, bad and compostable

Some time back, a customer asked us about using compostable plastic trash liners at their facility.  As we feature a health and environment friendly commercial cleaning program - careful chemical selection and use, indoor air quality Improvement technology, recycling programs - our client base tends to be aware of environmental concerns.

Compostable trash bags are available, and they work.  Problem is, for them to work, they have eventually to be composted.  Landfills in the Phoenix area do not try to compost; the climate is a bit too dry.  So there is no upside, environmental or otherwise, to the liners.  Further, they tend to weaken if too long exposed to heat, as in a supplier's non air conditioned warehouse (again, it gets hot in Phoenix).

Got to thinking about the above in reading an article in All About Arizona News about grocer Kroger's decision to phase out plastic shopping bags.  The bags are recyclable, but need to be gathered together and run in bulk; thrown in with ordinary recycle trash, they gum up the machinery.  Hard to organize in the real world.

Further, alternatives for plastic bags present little upside.  Paper bags take more energy to produce, though the trees cut to provide the paper are not old growth Sequoias, but farmed trees - little different in ecological impact than planting and harvesting corn.  The reusable tote bags that many tout (and tote) tend to not be washed often enough, and become breeding grounds for various pathogens from the last few visits to the grocer.  Drug and hospital bills from those pathogens will be significant, and ought be worked into the figures.

Finally, I need the plastic bags from grocer and newspaper for picking up after my dogs.  Phoenix (and most cities) forbid un-bagged poop in trash cans, or left on folks' lawns (go figure).

So, I'd have to buy and use plastic bags anyway.  If I shopped at Kroger.  Which I don't.

Hurricanes, coal ash pits and hog farms don't play well together

Caught an article on environmental concerns in the wake of flooding in North Carolina, that I'd wager many folks haven't tumbled to.  Not much more to say;  interesting read.

 

 

 

Don't flush it

In providing commercial janitorial service, we do our best to be a generalized resource to our clients on most anything regarding cleaning, maintenance or disposal - and not just recyclables.

Caught an interesting article in the New York Times about what not to flush; dental floss, condoms, contact lenses, wipes, most any plastic, medications - it's a long list.  Essentially, sewage treatment plants are not designed to deal with much beyond human waste and TP.  Rather than my giving you excerpts, best to sent you directly to the article.

Ocean trash removal - one pound at a time

Caught an article about a Boca Rotan firm that's doing its part to remove floating trash from the nearby ocean by paying fishermen to pull trash; they've just celebrated their million pound mark.  They pay expenses by selling bracelets, made of recycled material (though, I gather, not the stuff pulled from the ocean).

All very commendable.  One million pounds is 500 tons.  Though the planet is better off with those 500 tons in a landfill than in the ocean, that's not really a lot of trash (one could talk about a drop in a bucket...).  And I wonder just how "sustainable" a business model is that's based on selling bracelets.

Given the industrial quantity of trash in the world's oceans (think the Pacific's own "Sargasso Sea" of trash), it rather seems that we need an industrial scale approach.  Think trawlers with really large nets.  I gather that's being worked on, but nowhere near implementation.

Much of the "environmental" movement seems long on feel-good symbolism and short on real-world effect.  Think a bit about Seattle banning restaurant plastic straws.  Most Seattle straws are tossed into the trash at the given restaurant.  That trash is picked up by one of those big trucks you see trundling down your alley (just like the trash that we commercial janitorial services dump from client's office trash cans every night).  It is then dumped into a landfill (regardless of whether it is a city or a private trash hauling firm).  The straw would have a really long hike to get itself into the ocean.

So far as I know, virtually all first world cities use landfills, or recycling centers, or incinerators - never a barge to be dumped into the river or the ocean, as East Coast cities did a generation or two back.  Plastic trash in the ocean comes from second and third world countries, that can't yet afford a dump, or a trip to it. 

You really have to wonder what possible effect Seattle's forward-looking (feel-good) ordnance has on the straws from, say, Pakistan or Venezuela.  Those would be the ones impacting sea turtles and such.

Haboob

Haboob is Arabic for "blown"; that's the proper name for the dust storms that hit the Phoenix area this time of year.  They come in off both desert and farmland, and pack quite a punch:

"Manure and pesticides from agricultural land are prime ingredients within a haboob. Sometimes the wind will kick up brake dust and tiny pieces of tires from roads and highways as well. Spores beneath the desert crust could also go airborne, making people sick with Valley fever, a fungal lung infection."

The above is from an article in "All About Arizona News", that you might just enjoy.

Much is written in the national media about indoor air quality being poorer than outdoor air; that may be the case elsewhere, but often not in Arizona.  Has something to do with desert.

We measure indoor air quality in our client facilities, and record an exterior reading at the same time, to see what impact the exterior might be having on the interior, every time the front door is opened.  Typically, we see indoor air a good deal cleaner than the exterior (though there is a correlation), after we've been cleaning a given facility a few weeks.  In general, in a fairly tightly sealed 5-night per week account, we can cut daytime airborne particle count in half.  Most of our efficacy is through HEPA filtered vacuums, but microfiber mops and wipes help as well.  What we measure is particles smaller than 10 microns in diameter; particles between 1 and 10 microns are the most damaging to the health of one's lungs.  Smaller particles do not seem to bother the lungs, and larger particles are mostly filtered out by nose and throat.  The "mid-size" stuff penetrates deep, and tends to stay.  And most allergens are in that size range.

But when the Haboob hits, all bets are off.

Recycling is religion in Portland

Caught an interesting article in Willamette Week by the above title.  It mostly discusses the fervor with which folks in the trendy community fill the blue dumpsters - not just with recyclable stuff, but with and general garbage that comes to hand.  Used diapers are specifically mentioned, to give a bit of color to the discussion.  Culling out non-recyclables costs resources; conserving resources is, after all, the point of recycling.

Besides dealing with recycle programs in doing commercial janitorial, I served a few years on the City of Phoenix's Environmental Quality Commission; we addressed various issues related to the City's recycling program (and I got a tour of a state-of-the-art recycling facility). There are a number unintended consequences to recycling, as it's usually done.

You'll have noticed that China has decided to stop taking much of our trash.  We ship trash to less developed economies because it requires much hand sorting, and tends to cause health and environmental degradation, and we don't want to "dirty our own hands". (China is the destination of choice, rather than, say, India, because we buy lots of shipping containers full of stuff from China, and the containers have to be shipped back, full or not.  Cheap to fill them.)

Much plastic cannot be recycled, due to issues at the molecular level, so it winds up in a landfill in China rather than here.  That which can be recycled must, often, be sorted by hand. 

A possible analogy comes to mind - sorting metal recyclables.  It's easy to mechanically pull out anything magnetic - that is, iron based.  If memory serves, aluminum can be pulled as well.  Brass, bronze and copper, and different ... of each, can only be sorted by feel, and the trained eye.  And must be sorted to be re-used.  Some years back, a creative American invented equipment to do exactly that sorting.  It was never used, because Chinese tariffs taxed sorted metal much higher than unsorted.  Go figure.

We also had an issue, about the time of the Johnson Administration, of junk car bodies piling up around the country.  Containing various kinds of metal and plastic, and glass, and other stuff, there was no cost effective way to dismantle (that is, sort) junked cars.  Until a fellow in Texas invented a block-long crusher.  Effective equipment made recycling junk cars profitable enough that folks scrounged most of the junk cars from the countryside, nation wide, and crushed and recycled them.  You don't see many junk cars any more.

The upside of China's decision is that we will be under a good deal of pressure to find ways to profitably deal with our own trash, and might well succeed in dong so.

Now that I've got started, I talk a bit later about "running out of landfill space", and nuclear refuse.

It hit 109 in Phoenix today - let's head for the beach

I follow various newsletters and blogs concerning the commercial building maintenance industry - sanitation issues, building security, air quality and so on.  Keeps me on top of things.

Caught a study by Michigan State and US Geological Survey folks, via the American Society of Agronomy, on beach closings due to E. coli alerts, in this case along the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan.  On envisions too many toddlers, on the beach and in the water.  Nope.

To fix the problem, it would be handy to figure out the source. It seems that one can take samples from the problem beaches and, if one is a Michigan State or USGS researcher, source the "fecal markers".  Turns out, it's primarily gulls.  Some Canada geese and mallard ducks, but mostly gulls.

The solution? Train dogs to patrol the beaches, and scare off the gulls.

Now, when you see dogs on beaches, you immediately suspect "fecal" issues.  But, in this instance, the dogs are the solution, not the problem. 

Dust

Caught an article on a local site regarding dust storms, and the notification there-of.  The State Department of Transportation emails dust storm alerts on a county-by-county basis, mostly to alert drivers of an approaching storm and the attendant lack of visibility.  Problem is, Arizona has counties larger than some states, so a county-wide alert covers, often. quite a wider area than will the dust storm.  So people receive a warning,  see no dust storm and suspect they're "crying wolf".

The new system will be much more localized and, it is hoped, get more notice and respect.  They'll upgrade flash flood warning systems as well.

You wouldn't think dust could be such a danger.  There is much in the indoor air quality literature about inside air being much worse (at least from a dust perspective) than outside air.  Not so here.  We happen to be in a desert, without a lot of vegetation to hold the dust in place.  And we have wind.  In measuring air quality, which I do ongoing for my commercial janitorial clients, I often find outside air three or four times as polluted as inside.  (I Measure indoor air quality because our cleaning program is based around improving it, and thereby our client's health, via HEPA filtered vacs and so on.  And, what you can't measure, you can't improve.)

So, here we got dust.  At least, no earthquakes, mudslides, hurricanes, tsunamis or volcanos.

I'll take the dust.

Mardi Gras beads

Ash Wednesday was last week, so folks are just cleaning up after Mardi Gras.

Turns out all those beads pose a problem.  New Orleans cleaned 93,000 pounds of them from streets last year, and a whole lot from clogged storm drains.  Doesn't sound bad - cleaning is cleaning, and the more stuff the whole of society generates, the more work there is for my folks.  But then, there's the taxes to pay for it.  And, it seems most of the beads are manufactured in China, with quite low-end labor, and contain lots of lead, mercury, arsenic, and other colorful stuff. You can follow the parade route by measuring lead levels in the soil  Not to mention what it does to the landfill.

Seems there is a downside to even a really good party.

No market for our plastic

China has announced that it will no longer take in much of the world's recyclable waste - 24 categories thereof - including plastic.  It had been taking a bit over half of the world's plastic.  Where do we send it now?

In doing commercial janitorial in the greater Phoenix area, we do our best to "clean green": emergency efficiency, chemical selection and use and, naturally, recycling programs.

Unfortunately, environmental initiatives often involve unintended consequences.  Think Ethanol production over drafting the Oglala aquifer in the western great plains, and incidentally driving up corn prices world-wide - particularly onerous for low income folks.  Or folks here in the hot southwest ripping out perfectly good windows to put in dual pain windows, whose energy savings will never quite pay back the cost - and generally doing so instead of lower cost, and often more effective, solutions such as more attic insulation, or exterior window sunshades, or even shade trees.

Back to recycling.  I served a few years on Phoenix's Environmental Quality Commission.  Got to know some of the people involved in our recycling centers (and took a tour of one - quite an impressive facility).  The economics (monetary and material) of recycling many products are a bit "iffy".  Up until fairly recently, for instance, recycled product paper could be more expensive than that from farmed trees, give the high amounts of energy and water, not to mention bleach, required.  There also tends to be both environmental and human costs in much recycling: Think air and water pollution, and third world (usually) people sorting metal bits by hand.  That, in passing, is why we ship much recycling abroad - let the third world deal with the problems.  And why China doesn't want our stuff, anymore.

Mechanization may help.  Back in the '60's, America had serious concerns about the rusting car bodies dumped all over the countryside; it was uneconomical to recycle them until the block-long car crusher was developed.  You pretty much never see a rusting car in the countryside anymore.

But, in the meantime, it might do us all good to pause, take a deep breath, and consider all ramifications of a given proposal, whether on recycling or on a broader environmental issue.  Lets put the thought in, and do it right.